January 1931 Read online

  "Perhaps," agreed the pseudo-executive, "and again, perhaps not. He won't get me here; I am sure of that. They have this part of the room insulated. The phone wire is cut--my conversations there are all faked.

  "There is only one spot in this room where that current can pass. A heavy cable is grounded outside in wet earth. It comes to a copper plate on this desk; you can't see it--it is under those papers."

  * * * * *

  "And if the current comes--" began the visitor.

  "When it comes," the other corrected, "it will jump to that plate and go off harmlessly--I hope."

  "And then what? How does that let you out?"

  "Then we will see," said the presidential figure. "And you've been here long enough, Chief. Send in the President's secretary as you go out."

  "He arose to place a friendly, patronizing hand on the other's shoulder.

  "Good-by," he said, "and watch that electrician at twelve. He is to throw the big switch when I call."

  "Good luck," said the big man huskily. "We've got to hand it to you, Del; you're--"

  "Good-by!" The figure of the Chief Executive turned abruptly to his desk.

  There was more careful acting--another conference--some dictating. The clock on the desk gave the time as eleven fifty-five. The man before the flat topped desk verified it by a surreptitious glance at his watch. He dismissed the secretary and busied himself with some personal writing.

  Eleven fifty-nine--and he pushed paper and pen aside. The movement disturbed some other papers, neatly stacked. They were dislodged, and where they had lain was a disk of dull copper.

  "Ready," the man called softly. "Don't stand too near that line." The first boom of noonday bells came faintly to the room.

  The President--to all but the other actors in the morning's drama--leaned far back in his chair. The room was suddenly deathly still. The faint ticking of the desk clock was loud and rasping. There was heavy breathing audible in the room beyond. The last noonday chime had died away....

  The man at the desk was waiting--waiting. And he thought he was prepared, nerves steeled, for the expected. But he jerked back, to fall with the overturned chair upon the soft, thick-padded rug, at the ripping, crackling hiss that tore through the silent room.

  * * * * *

  From a point above the desk a blue arc flamed and wavered. Its unseen terminal moved erratically in the air, but the other end of the deadly flame held steady upon a glowing, copper disc.

  Delamater, prone on the floor, saw the wavering point that marked the end of the invisible carrier of the current--saw it drift aside till the blue arc was broken. It returned, and the arc crashed again into blinding flame. Then, as abruptly, the blue menace vanished.

  The man on the floor waited, waited, and tried to hold fast to some sense of time.

  Then: "Contact!" he shouted. "The switch! Close the switch!"

  "Closed!" came the answer from a distant room. There was a shouted warning to unseen men: "Stand back there--back--there's twenty thousand volts on that line--"

  Again the silence....

  "Would it work? Would it?" Delamater's mind was full of delirious, half-thought hopes. That fiend in some far-off room had cut the current meant as a death-bolt to the Nation's' head. He would leave the ray on--look along it to gloat over his easy victory. His generator must be insulated: would he touch it with his hand, now that his own current was off?--make of himself a conductor?

  In the air overhead formed a terrible arc.

  From the floor, Delamater saw it rip crashingly into life as twenty thousand volts bridged the gap of a foot or less to the invisible ray. It hissed tremendously in the stillness....

  And Delamater suddenly buried his face in his hands. For in his mind he was seeing a rigid, searing body, and in his nostrils, acrid, distinct, was the smell of burning flesh.

  "Don't be a fool," he told himself fiercely. "Don't be a fool! Imagination!"

  The light was out.

  "Switch off!" a voice was calling. There was a rush of swift feet from the distant doors; friendly hands were under him--lifting him--as the room, for Robert Delamater, President-in-name of the United States, turned whirlingly, dizzily black....

  * * * * *

  Robert Delamater, U. S. Secret Service operative, entered the office of his Chief. Two days of enforced idleness and quiet had been all he could stand. He laid a folded newspaper before the smiling, welcoming man.

  "That's it, I suppose," he said, and pointed to a short notice.

  "X-ray Operator Killed," was the caption. "Found Dead in Office in Watts Building." He had read the brief item many times.

  "That's what we let the reporters have," said the Chief.

  "Was he"--the operative hesitated for a moment--"pretty well fried?"

  "Quite!"

  "And the machine?"

  "Broken glass and melted metal. He smashed it as he fell."

  "The Eye of Allah," mused Delamater. "Poor devil--poor, crazy devil. Well, we gambled--and we won. How about the rest of the bet? Do I get the Mint?"

  "Hell, no!" said the Chief. "Do you expect to win all the time? They want to know why it took us so long to get him.

  "Now, there's a little matter out in Ohio, Del, that we'll have to get after--"

  THE "TELELUX"

  Sound and light were transformed into mechanical action at the banquet of the National Tool Exposition recently to illustrate their possibilities in regulating traffic, aiding the aviator, and performing other automatic functions.

  A beam of light was thrown on the "eyes" of a mechanical contrivance known as the "telelux," a brother of the "televox," and as the light was thrown on and off it performed mechanical function such as turning an electric switch.

  The contrivance, which was developed by the Westinghouse Electric and Manufacturing Company, utilizes two photo-electric cells, sensitive to the light beam. One of the cells is a selector, which progressively chooses any one of three operating circuits when light is thrown on it. The other cell is the operator, which opens or closes the chosen circuit, thus performing the desired function.

  S. M. Kintner, manager of the company's research department, who made the demonstration, also threw music across the room on a beam of light, and light was utilized in depicting the shape and direction of stresses in mechanical materials.

  The Fifth-Dimension Catapult

  A COMPLETE NOVELETTE

  By Murray Leinster

  The story of Tommy Reames' extraordinary rescue of Professor Denham and his daughter--marooned in the fifth dimension.

  FOREWORD

  This story has no normal starting-place, because there are too many places where it might be said to begin. One might commence when Professor Denham, Ph. D., M. A., etc., isolated a metal that scientists have been talking about for many years without ever being able to smelt. Or it might start with his first experimental use of that metal with entirely impossible results. Or it might very plausibly begin with an interview between a celebrated leader of gangsters in the city of Chicago and a spectacled young laboratory assistant, who had turned over to him a peculiar heavy object of solid gold and very nervously explained, and finally managed to prove, where it came from. With also impossible results, because it turned "King" Jacaro, lord of vice-resorts and rum-runners, into a passionate enthusiast in non-Euclidean geometry. The whole story might be said to begin with the moment of that interview.

  But that leaves out Smithers, and especially it leaves out Tommy Reames. So, on the whole, it is best to take up the narrative at the moment of Tommy's first entrance into the course of events.

  CHAPTER I

  He came to a stop in a cloud of dust that swirled up to and all about the big roadster, and surveyed the gate of the private road. The gate was rather impressive. At its top was a sign. "Keep Out!" Halfway down was another sign. "Private Property. Trespassers Will Be Prosecuted." On one gate-post was another notice, "Live Wires Within." and on the other a defiant placard. "Savage Dogs At L
arge Within This Fence."

  The fence itself was all of seven feet high and made of the heaviest of woven-wire construction. It was topped with barbed wire, and went all the way down both sides of a narrow right of way until it vanished in the distance.

  Tommy got out of the car and opened the gate. This fitted the description of his destination, as given him by a brawny, red-headed filling-station attendant in the village some two miles back. He drove the roadster through the gate, got out and closed it piously, got back in the car and shot it ahead.

  He went humming down the narrow private road at forty-five miles an hour. That was Tommy Reames' way. He looked totally unlike the conventional description of a scientist of any sort--as much unlike a scientist as his sport roadster looked unlike a scientist's customary means of transit--and ordinarily he acted quite unlike one. As a matter of fact, most of the people Tommy associated with had no faintest inkling of his taste for science as an avocation. There was Peter Dalzell, for instance, who would have held up his hands in holy horror at the idea of Tommy Reames being the author of that article. "On the Mass and Inertia of the Tesseract," which in the Philosophical Journal had caused a controversy.

  And there was one Mildred Holmes--of no importance in the matter of the Fifth-Dimension Catapult--who would have lifted beautifully arched eyebrows in bored unbelief if anybody had suggested that Tommy Reames was that Thomas Reames whose "Additions to Herglotz's Mechanics of Continua" produced such diversities of opinion in scientific circles. She intended to make Tommy propose to her some day, and thought she knew all about him. And everybody, everywhere, would have been incredulous of his present errand.

  * * * * *

  Gliding down the narrow, fenced-in road. Tommy was a trifle dubious about this errand himself. A yellow telegraph-form in his pocket read rather like a hoax, but was just plausible enough to have brought him away from a rather important tennis match. The telegram read:

  PROFESSOR DENHAM IN EXTREME DANGER THROUGH EXPERIMENT BASED ON YOUR ARTICLE ON DOMINANT COORDINATES YOU ALONE CAN HELP HIM IN THE NAME OF HUMANITY COME AT ONCE.

  A. VON HOLTZ.

  The fence went on past the car. A mile, a mile and a half of narrow lane, fenced in and made as nearly intruder-proof as possible.

  "Wonder what I'd do," said Tommy Reames, "if another car came along from the other end?"

  He deliberately tried not to think about the telegram any more. He didn't believe it. He couldn't believe it. But he couldn't ignore it, either. Nobody could: few scientists, and no human being with a normal amount of curiosity. Because the article on dominant coordinates had appeared in the Journal of Physics and had dealt with a state of things in which the normal coordinates of everyday existence were assumed to have changed their functions: when the coordinates of time, the vertical, the horizontal and the lateral changed places and a man went east to go up and west to go "down" and ran his street-numbers in a fourth dimension. It was mathematical foolery, from one standpoint, but it led to some fascinating if abstruse conclusions.

  * * * * *

  But his brain would not remain away from the subject of the telegram, even though a chicken appeared in the fenced-in lane ahead of him and went flapping wildly on before the car. It rose in mid-air, the car overtook it as it rose above the level of the hood, and there was a rolling, squawking bundle of shedding feathers tumbling over and over along the hood until it reached the slanting windshield. There it spun wildly upward, left a cloud of feather's fluttering about Tommy's head, and fell still squawking into the road behind. By the back-view mirror, Tommy could see it picking itself up and staggering dizzily back to the side of the road.

  "My point was," said Tommy vexedly to himself, speaking of the article the telegram referred to, "that a man can only recognize three dimensions of space and one of time. So that if he got shot out of this cosmos altogether he wouldn't know the difference. He'd still seem to be in a three-dimensioned universe. And what is there in that stuff to get Denham in trouble?"

  A house appeared ahead. A low, rambling sort of bungalow with a huge brick barn behind it. The house of Professor Denham, very certainly, and that barn was the laboratory in which he made his experiments.

  Instinctively, Tommy stepped on the gas. The car leaped ahead. And then he was braking frantically. A pipe-framed gate with thinner, unpainted wire mesh filling its surface loomed before him, much too late for him to stop. There was a minor shock, a crashing and squeaking, and then a crash and shattering of glass. Tommy bent low as the top bar of the gate hit his windshield. The double glass cracked and crumpled and bent, but did not fly to bits. And the car came to a halt with its wheels intricately entangled in torn-away fence wire. The gate had been torn from its hinges and was draped rakishly over the roadster. A tire went flat with a loud hissing noise, and Tommy Reames swore softly under his breath and got out to inspect the damage.

  * * * * *

  He was deciding that nothing irreparable was wrong when a man came bursting out of the brick building behind the house. A tall, lean, youngish man who waved his arms emphatically and approached shouting:

  "You had no right to come in here! You must go away at once! You have damaged property! I will tell the Professor! You must pay for the damage! You must--"

  "Damn!" said Tommy Reames. He had just seen that his radiator was punctured. A spout of ruddy, rusty water was pouring out on the grass.

  The youngish man came up furiously. A pale young man, Tommy noticed. A young man with bristling, close-cropped hair and horn-rimmed spectacles before weak-looking eyes. His mouth was very full and very red, in marked contrast to the pallor of his cheeks.

  "Did you not see the sign upon the gate?" he demanded angrily, in curiously stilted English. "Did you not see that trespassers are forbidden? You must go away at once! You will be prosecuted! You will be imprisoned! You--"

  Tommy said irritably:

  "Are you Von Holtz? My name is Reames. You telegraphed me."

  The waving, lanky arms stopped in the middle of an excited gesture. The weak-looking eyes behind the lenses widened. A pink tongue licked the too-full, too-red lips.

  "Reames? The Herr Reames?" Von Holtz stammered. Then he said suspiciously, "But you are not--you cannot be the Herr Reames of the article on dominant coordinates!"

  "I don't know why," said Tommy annoyedly. "I'm also the Herr Reames of several other articles, such as on the mechanics of continua and the mass and inertia of the tesseract. And I believe the current Philosophical Journal--"

  * * * * *

  He surveyed the spouting red stream from the radiator and shrugged ruefully.

  "I wish you'd telephone the village to have somebody come out and fix my car," he said shortly, "and then tell me if this telegram is a joke or not."

  He pulled out a yellow form and offered it. He had taken an instinctive dislike to the lean figure before him, but suppressed the feeling.

  Von Holtz took the telegram and read it, and smoothed it out, and said agitatedly:

  "But I thought the Herr Reames would be--would be a venerable gentleman! I thought--"

  "You sent that wire," said Tommy. "It puzzled me just enough to make me rush out here. And I feel like a fool for having done it. What's the matter? Is it a joke?"

  Von Holtz shook his head violently, even as he bit his lips.

  "No! No!" he protested. "The Herr Professor Denham is in the most terrible, most deadly danger! I--I have been very nearly mad, Herr Reames. The Ragged Men may seize him!... I telegraphed to you. I have not slept for four nights. I have worked! I have racked my brains! I have gone nearly insane, trying to rescue the Herr Professor! And I--"

  * * * * *

  Tommy stared.

  "Four days?" he said. "The thing, whatever it is, has been going on for four days?"

  "Five," said Von Holtz nervously. "It was only to-day that I thought of you, Herr Reames. The Herr Professor Denham had praised your articles highly. He said that you were the only man who would be able to unde
rstand his work. Five days ago--"

  Tommy grunted.

  "If he's been in danger for five days," he said skeptically, "he's not in such a bad fix or it'd have been over. Will you phone for a repairman? Then we'll see what it's all about."

  The lean arms began to wave again as Von Holtz said desperately:

  "But Herr Reames, it is urgent! The Herr Professor is in deadly danger!"

  "What's the matter with him?"

  "He is marooned," said Von Holtz. Again he licked his lips. "He is marooned, Herr Reames, and you alone--"

  "Marooned?" said Tommy more skeptically still. "In the middle of New York State? And I alone can help him? You sound more and more as if you were playing a rather elaborate and not very funny practical joke. I've driven sixty miles to get here. What is the joke, anyhow?"

  Von Holtz said despairingly:

  "But it is true, Herr Reames! He is marooned. He has changed his coordinates. It was an experiment. He is marooned in the fifth dimension!"

  * * * * *

  There was dead silence. Tommy Reames stared blankly. Then his gorge rose. He had taken an instinctive dislike to this lean young man, anyhow. So he stared at him, and grew very angry, and would undoubtedly have gotten into his car and turned it about and driven it away again if it had been in any shape to run. But it wasn't. One tire was flat, and the last ruddy drops from the radiator were dripping slowly on the grass. So he pulled out a cigarette case and lighted a cigarette and said sardonically:

  "The fifth dimension? That seems rather extreme. Most of us get along very well with three dimensions. Four seems luxurious. Why pick on the fifth?"

  Von Holtz grew pale with anger in his turn. He waved his arms, stopped, and said with stiff formality:

  "If the Herr Reames will follow me into the laboratory I will show him Professor Denham and convince him of the Herr Professor's extreme danger."

  Tommy had a sudden startling conviction that Von Holtz was in earnest. He might be mad, but he was in earnest. And there was undoubtedly a Professor Denham, and this was undoubtedly his home and laboratory.